During SOAR Time and in the middle of AP and EOC testing, Liberty students noticed something unusual at 10:29 a.m. Wednesday May 5, when the power and wifi in the whole school went dark. No one knew what was going on and neither did administration. However, it wasn’t only a school outage. Many schools across the Wentzville district as well as homes and business around in the whole area lost all their power.
Over 15,000 people were affected by this power outage. A lot of questions are being asked about this outage. Why did it happen? Principal Ed Nelson had just returned from a meeting when the outage happened.
“We knew it was larger than Liberty,” Nelson said. “Other than that I had no knowledge of what was going on, I just heard the district was trying to figure it out.”
However, while no one at school and in the area knew why the power went out, Cuivre River Electric Cooperation knew that it wasn’t something big that would affect people for a long period of time.
“It was an unplanned maintenance that was happening in our area,” Cuivre River Electric Cooperative employee Avery said. “There wasn’t any huge reason, it was just some blinks that had happened, short outages, but everything should be restored as of right now.”
A lot of other questions are being asked as well. Is this going to keep happening? And most importantly; How will this affect all the AP and EOC tests going on?
AP Lit teacher Alexander Schaper had students taking the AP Lit test when the power went out.
“From what I could tell I didn’t lose connection to the internet, but I guess I’m going to find out really soon because seventh hour is gonna show up in my class,” Schaper said. “I’m sure they’ll tell me all about it if they got interrupted.”
However, with the power quickly coming back on within a few minutes of the outage at 10:29 a.m. it was only a matter of time before the next wave came. At 10:56 a.m. the power went out for the second time, startling students and teachers in the building. For about another 10 minutes no one had a clue on why the power kept going out.
Shortly after both outages and some time was given for the district to get some news on the outage, an email was sent to all school principals that were affected explaining what they knew.
“Josh (Schaffer is the Executive Director of Facilities) has reached out to Cuivre River and they are doing some work in the area,” WSD Assistant Director of Maintenance Linda Bagby said. “They are hoping that it will not happen again, but if it does, it should be short lived.”
While there haven’t been any reports on if these outages heavily affected classes, everyone is wondering if this will happen again.
Update: 1:21 p.m. power has been restored across the area. Only a few areas are still being affected by the outage, however Liberty is no longer impacted.
